


Fell on Black Days

by eluna



Series: When We Were Young [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Background Het, Codependent Winchesters (Supernatural), Consent Issues, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dean Winchester Has Anxiety, Dean Winchester Has an Eating Disorder, Dean Winchester's Birthday, Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester UST, Depressed Sam Winchester, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotionally Hurt Dean Winchester, Emotionally Hurt Sam Winchester, Emotionally Repressed Dean Winchester, Indian Character, Intersectionality, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Meta, Muslim Character, POV Dean Winchester, Past Robin (Supernatural: Bad Boys)/Dean Winchester, Poverty, Pre-Series, Privilege, Protective Dean Winchester, Protective Sam Winchester, References to Shakespeare, Roughhousing, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Teen Winchesters, Theatre, Unreliable Narrator, Weecest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-14
Packaged: 2018-10-02 12:02:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10217588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluna/pseuds/eluna
Summary: Dean reminds himself that he has to stop this, it’s damn selfish is what it is, if he’s going to take Sam’s food then he at least shouldn’t waste the money and calories like this. It’s just that Dean gets so sick with a belly full of food that isn’t his, not when they’re so fast running out and Sammy’s fast getting taller, growing up, going to be fourteen soon, if you can believe that.(Title from the Soundgarden song. Works as a standalone, but works even better in conjunction with series prequel "Have You Seen Me Lately.")





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Giant thanks to **publia** for the beta read (and the huge time suck of listening to me freak out about this 'verse forever all the time) and to Samantha for her help with writing a Muslim character! _Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)_ is a real play written by Ann-Marie MacDonald (which I've seen performed twice at the Hilberry in Detroit and it was incredible) and does not belong to me. Standard disclaimers: I do not necessarily share Dean's or Sam's tastes in music, and I definitely do not share Dean's occasional flippancy with using certain slurs (he calls himself "retarded" at one point in Chapter 2, and I want to make it super clear that this is not actually okay, self-directed or not).
> 
> Chapter 2 is already written, and I'll have it up as soon as **publia** 's done with it. Thanks for reading, and please drop a kudos or comment if you like!

_Nevada, January 1997_

When Dad’s on a hunt, it’s like this: They play house, Dean the mother-brother-nurturer and Sammy the geek kid who hogs the remote and bitches about target practice for twice as long as practice ultimately takes, and for a while things are kind of good. Dean’s got the parenting thing down pat by now: packs brown bag school lunches for both of them; quizzes Sam on his notes from history class; yells at him to fix the salt lines, and to hurry up in the bathroom before he’s late for school, and to use a condom even if she says she’s on birth control (netting Dean a bright blush and a middle finger from a mortified, thirteen-year-old Sam every time). He keeps track of how they’re doing on cash, how close they get to credit limits on cards, and picks up an evenings-and-weekends job or sends in a couple credit card applications if he knows they’ll be staying put for a while. He asks Sam about his day over dinner, surprises the kid with movie tickets and clothes from Goodwill that fit properly, pins him when they practice sparring and tries to savor the feeling of Sam’s pulse kicking at his palm. Dean doesn’t go out with girls after school or work, not anymore—pulls them into bathrooms and closets during lunch or in the half-hour between when the high school lets out and the middle school does, so that he’ll get home before Sam does, see Sam safe, keep Sam safe.

They play house, and at first things are kind of good, until one of two things happens: Dad gets back, or they start running out of money. This time, they’re running out of money.

Dean’s at the Vons buying groceries for the week when the card reader rejects Dad’s—or, rather, Remington Maguire’s—card that’s supposed to have a couple thousand dollars left on it, if what Dad said about its credit limit is true. It’s clearly _not_ true, though, because Dean’s standing there under the hot fluorescent ceiling lights with the cashier prompting him for forty-six dollars and eighteen cents that he _doesn’t have_ , swiping the card two more times but to no avail, and he’s only got—he stuffs his hands in his jeans pockets—fifteen bucks in cash to pay with.

He could call Sam. When Dean had taken off to hit the store, Sammy had been totally engrossed in some procedural crime drama marathon on TV and hadn’t looked interested in leaving the couch, let alone the house, anytime today; he should still be home if Dean wants to have him grab two twenties from the nightstand between their beds and meet Dean at the Vons. Sam, whose ribs were all jutting out of his chest like they were about to rip open his skin the last time Dean saw him shirtless—he can’t call Sam; of course he can’t call Sam.

Ignoring the cashier’s narrowed eyes and pursed lips, Dean has her cancel everything on his order except the eggs, bread, and ramen noodles. After a second’s consideration, he has her rescan the package of Red Vines that he’d grabbed for Sam. What Sammy doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and Dean’s going to _make sure_ that he doesn’t have to find out.

The ten-minute walk back to the house is more than enough time to call Dad, brace for a fight, obey, avoid a fight. Dad picks up on the third ring. “Dean. What’s happening over there?”

“The card’s maxed. We’ve only put eight hundred on it. You said—”

“Shit. What’s the name on it?”

“Maguire. Remington Maguire.”

“ _Maguire_ … There should be an approval letter for it in the kitchen somewhere. Check the credit limit on it. If it _is_ only eight hundred—have you gotten a job down there yet?”

“No, sir. I’ve been applying places.”

“Keep applying, then. And apply for another card. I’ll be down there as soon as I can.”

“Dad, the rent—”

But Dad’s already hung up, the soft _click_ of disconnection reverberating in the humid Nevada air. Cursing, Dean stuffs his piece-of-crap phone back in his pocket, does the math. It’ll take at least two or three weeks for a new card application to go through; even if he got a job today, it’d probably be another two weeks before his first paycheck came in. Rent for the house—fifteen hundred dollars—is due in eleven days, and if Dean’s remembering right, they’ve only got about fifteen-fifty in cash at the house.

Fifty bucks to feed both him and Sam for most likely two weeks or longer. Dean doesn’t know if that’s possible. Dean doesn’t even know if fifty bucks could feed Sam alone for two weeks, never mind both of them.

Sammy will be okay. Dean’s made it work before.

When Dean lets himself into the house, Sam’s still sprawled _all_ the hell across the sofa, lying on his stomach with one arm dangling to the floor and the other stretched above his head to grip one of the armrests. “Budge up, weirdo,” says Dean after he tosses the eggs in the fridge. Flinging the Red Vines in Sam’s general direction, he crosses the living room to drop down on top of Sam’s feet and ankles.

“Get off me,” Sammy grumbles good-naturedly, yanking his feet out from underneath Dean and draping his body over the armrest from the shoulders up. He twists onto his side to bend his knees and make room for Dean, his shirt riding up a little to expose his waist.

“Make me, bitch,” says Dean on an impulse, and he mercilessly tickles Sam’s bare stomach.

Shrieking with annoyance and laughter and half a dozen things in between, Sam tries to flip onto his stomach to shield it but winds up rolling both of them onto the scratchily carpeted floor. Dean shouldn’t be doing this, should be conserving his calories, conserving _Sam’s_ calories, but dicking around like this is one of the only ways Dean can think of to feel out Sam’s weight and figure out how worried he should be without raising Sam’s suspicions. And maybe it’s nice, too, sharing body heat and breath like this—when there’s something he can give away for Sammy.

He manages to push Sam’s shirt up higher in the tussle and allows himself a sweeping once-over of the kid’s ribs. Dean still doesn’t like how visible they are under the skin, but Sam’s starting to build up a little muscle mass by his pecs, too, and that’s a good sign: if he were honest-to-god malnourished, Sam’s muscles would be atrophying, not growing. Dean stops tickling him and rubs his hand up Sam’s ribs to his sternum under the guise of keeping him pinned to the ground. For the most part, his flesh feels firm and even. Good. “Say uncle,” he teases Sammy once he’s used his free hand to pin both of Sam’s arms above his head at their wrists.

Dean can feel Sam’s pained efforts to free his wrists, to kick with all his might, but Dean wrests his legs on top of Sam’s and presses down hard. Sam’s eyes are burning amber slits when Dean looks up at his face and grins.

“Bite me,” Sam says, and he bucks his damn hips up into Dean’s. Sam’s not sporting wood or anything, thank god, but Dean’s so startled as it is that Sam’s got him flipped over and nailed to the floor at his neck in seconds.

“Jesus Christ, Sammy, is that your new strategy? Molest the monsters to gain the advantage?” Dean’s voice is cracking all over, Sam’s forearm all but crushing his windpipe.

“Worked on _you_ , didn’t it?” Sammy snickers.

“Shut up and eat your Red Vines,” grunts Dean as he delivers Sam a swift kick to the shin and heaves himself into a sitting position. “There’s ramen for dinner whenever you want to make yourself some.”

Sam hops to his feet and offers Dean a hand up. “You’re not having any?”

“Probably shouldn’t eat anything else until tomorrow. I had to spend half of fifth period shitting out my lunch as diarrhea today,” Dean lies swiftly, hooting with laughter at the thoroughly repulsed look that appears on Sam’s face. “Dude, relax. I changed your diapers until I was seven. Don’t be so weird about it.”

Sam makes another face and rips open the Red Vines as he flops into one corner of the couch. “Dean…”

“Yeah, buddy.”

Hunching over as he draws his knees up to his chest, Sam says in a quieter voice, “Drink lots of fluids, okay?”

Dean shoots him the most casual smile he can drum up. “Yeah, yeah, freak. I will.”

And he does, because even though he hasn’t actually got diarrhea, it’s easier if he keeps his stomach filled up with _something_ more than air all night, even if he just pisses it right back out half an hour later. The hunger’s easy to ignore until Sam busies himself making the ramen, the sharp scent of the toppings packet wafting cruelly out of the kitchen. Sammy’s asleep by the time Dean’s stomach starts cramping; he pops two of Dad’s sleeping pills and hops into bed, telling himself that he’ll sleep some of it off, that the first couple days are always the roughest.

They’ve got a few things still in the fridge, thank god, that Dean can use to cobble together breakfast and a school lunch for Sam the next morning. There’s still a bite’s worth of scrambled eggs on Sam’s plate when he scurries off to brush his teeth, and Dean hesitates for just a few seconds before wolfing it down and setting Sam’s plate on top of the clean one that Dean had placed in the sink before Sam woke up.

Dean skips most of the school day to bus around town in search of job applications, managing to find a handful of places he hadn’t tried last week that are hiring. He fills them all out on-site— _knowing_ from the junior managers’ false grins that they’re only looking to hire somebody with a three-point-eight GPA and captain of the varsity team and ten hours a week volunteering at a shelter and three years’ experience already as a busboy or barista or sales clerk or cashier or whatever—and he makes it back to his high school of the month ten minutes before his trigonometry exam in fifth period is supposed to start.

His girlfriend of the month, an Indian girl named Mounia with piercing eyes and a light stutter, takes the seat next to his after the bell rings and the previous class filters out. “Is everything all right, Dean?” she asks without giving him so much as a hello, frown lines marring her perfectly smooth forehead. “You weren’t in Spanish this morning.”

“Fine. Good. Just taking care of some business for my little brother,” Dean says absently, which is true enough.

Mounia cocks an eyebrow but doesn’t pry. Dean likes that about her: she’s sharp, to-the-point, gets right down to making out or studying or working on her lines for the school play without wasting energy on pleasantries. They both know she isn’t _really_ all that interested in why Dean cuts class or what’s going on at home with Sam, and he likes that she doesn’t pretend to be—makes it easier not to feel guilty for not getting to know her much.

It’s halfway through the school year, and Dean still doesn’t understand much trig beyond SOHCAHTOA, but he gives it his best shot before following Mounia to physiology class (probably the only class he’s taking that’ll ever be relevant to him) and then, after, to the drama room on the second floor. He’s got twenty more minutes until he needs to leave to make it home before Sam does, and although Mounia doesn’t seem to be in the mood to mess around today—she swats Dean’s hand away when his thumb dips into her jeans—she lets him squish in beside her on the piano bench and loop an arm around her waist, under the blouse, as she plays arpeggios with one hand and sings endless scales, up and down, setting her eyebrows and lips into hard lines whenever her lilting vibrato falters. She’s got a pretty enough voice: not very soulful, but airy.

Mounia heads home directly after school the following day, but by Wednesday, Dean thinks he might finally get lucky when she slams him against the drama room door and kisses _hard_. Mounia’s not the greatest kisser—doesn’t seem to know what to do with her tongue besides let it loll around while Dean does the work—but she’s warm and wet and deft with her fingers, whether she’s pulling long strokes over his boxers or tracing a trail of goose bumps over his chest or, like now, fingering the hemline of his overshirt as she starts to push it out of the way—

Shit. Dean tries to act natural when he flips them around and goes to pin her wrists above her head against the door, but Mounia pulls her tongue off of the roof of his mouth and says matter-of-factly, “Come on, Dean. We’ve done this almost every weekday since you moved to town, and you’re still too m-modest to take _any_ of your clothes off in front of me?”

This is the problem with staying in one place with one person for too long: the girl always starts asking questions that Dean can’t answer. Even if his chest weren’t sporting a hulking, green-brown bruise from the skinwalker he faced off against over Christmas break, it’s too dangerous to show anyone the wickerwork of scars lining his body and risk a phone call to CPS. “I’m a slow-moving gentleman,” he says instead with the cheekiest grin he can summon up.

“You realize that’s ridiculous when we’ve already been having sex, don’t you?”

He pulls off and stumbles back a step, tugging down his Henley. “Over the underwear doesn’t count. Besides, sex and intimacy aren’t the same thing. You don’t see me pushing you to take your burqa off in front of me, do you?”

He can tell from the way Mounia’s eyes flare and shoulders stiffen that he’s crossed a line, one that Dean hadn’t even meant to cross, but he hasn’t eaten more than a couple of bites since Sunday, and he’s been lying to Sam about it all week, and Dean gets so _tired_ of being hard-balled into corners. “It’s my fault I assumed you were interested in any, uh, _intimacy_ that wasn’t physical, but I think we’re done here. Just because I’m not, uh, ashamed of my body doesn’t mean I don’t expect any respect, Dean. The headscarf that I wear is called a hijab, by the way, not a-a burqa.”

Next thing he knows, Mounia’s gone and Dean’s still processing how quickly that shit escalated just now. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d struck out with a girl in the space of a two-minute conversation, but his face heats up and he cusses loudly anyway as he tucks his dick back into his jeans: Mounia’s the closest thing to a friend that he’s made in this town, and he actually _likes_ her, and without anybody but Sam to talk to…

-

The charade stays intact until Friday. Maybe Dean should see that as an accomplishment, but he can’t help feeling like he’s failed Sam, again.

Dean’s still on the outs with Mounia, so he comes home in plenty of time to make Sam a peanut butter sandwich, closing his eyes hard when the thick, sweet smell of it wafts toward him. He’s passed the point of feeling the hunger anymore and settled into that easy, familiar feeling of emptiness, but he’s clammy and weak all over, and the littlest whiff of anything brings the cramps and the nausea back in full force.

Fifteen minutes later, the door bangs open, and Sam’s heavy backpack clatters to the floor as he looks up behind him and touches up the salt line. It’s not a big house: the front door opens into the laminate kitchen floor, and there’s no dividing wall to separate it from the living room where Dean’s seated, twisting his head around to watch Sammy come in. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Sam says back breathlessly, still winded from the walk from school, and he busies himself shedding jackets and kicking off his shoes as Dean turns back to face the TV.

Grabbing the plate with the sandwich off the counter, Sam loops around the back of the couch to sit at the opposite end from Dean, nestling his legs into the cushions with his feet resting a careful few inches away from Dean’s knees. Like he wants to get close but not too close. Like contact that used to be casual would be filthy now, ever since the thing with the pills. Balancing the plate on his knees, Sam asks, “Is the credit card with you or in the bedroom?”

Dean concentrates on keeping his breathing at the same rate. “Why, what do you need?”

Sam raises his eyebrows. “It’s for a school project. Book presentation for English.”

“I, uh, was going to run some errands tonight anyway—I can pick the stuff up for you if you write down what you need.”

“No, that’s okay, I can get it myself,” says Sammy a little too quickly.

Dean’s heart rate is starting to pick up, but after a pause, he cracks a smirk and says, “All you have to do is ask if you need lube or condoms—”

“Jesus, Dean, it’s not that! Just tell me where the card is!”

“Not if you can’t tell me what you really want to use it for,” says Dean, thinking fast.

“You sound just like Dad,” Sam hisses, pink splotches already starting to rise in his cheeks. “He doesn’t have any faith in me, either.”

“The card’s maxed out and there’s not enough cash, _okay_?” says Dean. He wants to take it back the instant it comes out as he watches Sammy’s eyes go round and indecipherable, but Sam’s the one person Dean can never lie to for long: Sam _riles_ him, and things just—slip out when Sam riles him. “I had to use up the last of the spare cash on groceries on Wednesday, and there’s only enough to either keep buying food or to pay the rent and keep the house another month. Not both.”

“Dean…”

“Eat the damn sandwich, Sammy.”

“ _Dean_.” Reluctantly, Dean meets Sam’s eyes and keeps quiet. “You should have told me. I’ve been eating whenever I feel like it—”

“And you should be able to!”

“And you shouldn’t? You still treat me like I’m this little kid who can’t handle the truth, and—”

“Dammit, Sammy, this isn’t some fun privilege I’m depriving you of,” Dean growls.

Shaking his head hotly, Sam says, “No, but you _always_ lie to me, and then I _always_ have to feel guilty for not rationing my portions and making it worse. You were lying about having diarrhea, too, weren’t you? When was the last meal you even ate?”

Dean pulls a hand down his face and sighs. It takes him a moment to realize what Sammy wants when Sam holds his plate out across the couch. “It’s yours, Sammy.”

“No. You need to eat.”

“I’m fine.”

“Oh, yeah?” And Sam’s tossing the plate onto the ratty orange carpet away from them and tackling him to the ground before Dean knows what’s happening. He’s underneath Sam, pinned quickly to the ground at the wrists and sternum, the inverse image of their play-fighting on Sunday when he’d held Sam down just like this—only today, Dean’s too shaky and limp to put up any kind of a fight, and the tussle is over as soon as it starts. “Flip me off,” Sammy challenges him in a scary-quiet voice, and Dean may have failed him by allowing him to find out, but in this moment, all he can think about is how healthy-strong-capable Sam’s becoming, bony ribs and all.

“You’re getting so big,” says Dean, and something cracks wide open in Sammy’s face.

Nimbly, Sam rolls off of him and lunges across the floor for the plate. He fidgets until he’s sitting on the carpet across from Dean, knees tucked under his chin, and sets the plate in Dean’s lap. “Please eat the sandwich. Please.”

Pathetically, Dean grouses, “You wouldn’t tell _me_ what you wanted the money for.”

Flushing all the way down to his collarbone, Sam says, “I wanted to buy you something nice for once for your birthday. I hadn’t decided what yet. Now eat.”

Dean’s so shocked and sickened that he obeys—the first two bites going down slowly before he mauls the rest of the thing—and he manages to last a whole two hours before excusing himself to take a shower, turning on the bathtub faucet, then slipping a familiar finger into his throat and retching, quiet as he can, into the toilet.

His stomach stops churning soon as he flushes and watches the yellowish fluid and loose hunks of peanut butter swirl down the basin, but by the time he showers and then emerges in his pajama bottoms into the living room, Dean’s hit with an overpowering wave of nausea or shame or—something like adoration to find Sammy heating up what looks like quite a bit of ramen on the stove, tongue stuck out in concentration. “We’re going to pick food,” he informs Dean by way of greeting.

“What?”

“You said we can pick to either buy enough food or keep the house another month. We’ll buy all the food we need and move into a motel the day the rent payment would have been due. I’ll help budget for meals. I’m not going to let us just—”

While he’s talking, Sam doesn’t react much as Dean crosses the room to join him at the stove, but he falls silent with an abrupt little “ah!” when Dean grips him by the shoulder and manhandles him into a hug, pressing Sammy’s cheek to his bare chest where Sam’s full height lands against him. His arms are limp at his sides as he says, “You haven’t hugged me since I…”

“I was following your lead.”

Sam makes a noise that’s somewhere between a laugh and a sniff and winds his arms around Dean’s waist. He burns up with more than just nausea now where Sam’s touching him.

It’s the first time since it happened two months ago that either of them has acknowledged out loud the pills-kissing-more-than-kissing incident, although that’s not to say that it hasn’t affected Dean’s behavior around Sam, that he isn’t petrified that he’ll wake up one day to find Sammy slumped over dead at the kitchen table or something because Dean said the wrong thing or didn’t try hard enough. Even with the door open to it, maybe, now that Sam’s brought it up, Dean’s still sure that anything he may say about it could be _the_ wrong thing that tips him over the edge. He lets go of Sam without another word, but he makes a point of brushing shoulders with Sam later when he’s reaching around him to grab utensils for the table, and Sammy bumps his hip against the spot where it falls on Dean’s thigh in return.

He scarfs down three helpings, to Sam’s delight, and throws them back up as soon as Sam’s read exactly ten more pages of whatever novel he’s into right now, and reminds himself that he has to _stop_ this, it’s damn selfish is what it is, if he’s going to take Sam’s food then he at least shouldn’t waste the money and calories like this. It’s just that Dean gets so _sick_ with a belly full of food that isn’t his, not when they’re so fast running out and Sammy’s fast getting taller, growing up, going to be fourteen soon, if you can believe that. Cleaning himself up, he scrutinizes himself for a long moment in the bathroom mirror, and he lifts up his shirt gingerly. Shit, his ribs look even worse than Sammy’s.

“Dean, get out of the bathroom, I need to take a piss,” calls Sam from the living room.

“Yeah? You should wash that potty mouth out with soap while you’re in there, is what you gotta do,” Dean fires right back.

And so they choose food over shelter with only six more days paid on the house. Sam budgets them thirty dollars a day for food, ignoring Dean’s insistence that they can’t afford that much; Dean scouts for motels and finds a (not _too_ skeevy) joint with a weekly special on a one-queen room with a promise of a fold-out cot. That gives them about a week and a half in the motel, _maybe_ two if they stretch the food, before they use up all the cash Dad left them. Dean won’t be able to apply for a card without a mailing address to have one sent to, now that they won’t be staying in the house, but if any of these goddamn businesses would just _hire_ him, the paychecks would put them in the clear as long as he’d be able to pick up enough hours on the job.

He spends all day Saturday and Sunday applying for jobs around town and both evenings working up the courage to call Dad or Mounia or both. Ultimately, Dean calls neither, binges and purges, calls his brother a geek and a bitch and a spitfire while Sam’s trying to do his homework.

It’s three in the morning when Dean awakens with a jolt to find Sammy climbing timidly into his bed, cheeks dimpled and lips pursed. “Wha’sa matter? Why aren’t you asleep?” he asks blearily, even as he throws a heavy arm around Sam and pulls him in close.

“Dean, listen, um… about the other day.” Dean’s core temperature shoots up by a good fifteen degrees, he’s sure of it. “I shouldn’t’ve yelled at you, but… I just want you to see me as somebody you can tell things to as an equal, not some little kid who—who’s too immature, or who can’t handle—”

“I know you can handle shit. I trust you as my equal more than, hell, more than _anyone_ I know. You’re my freakin’…” Sam waits patiently. “But just because you can handle it doesn’t mean you should have to.”

Sammy lets out a little sigh and nuzzles into Dean’s neck, clutching at the neckline of Dean’s T-shirt. “It’s not your call.”

“Sammy, I’m taking care of you the best I can.”

“Not your job.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it’s _not_. You’re seventeen; you’re still a kid, too; you’re not my parent.”

“Somebody’s gotta be!” says Dean, louder than he intended, and Sam flinches.

“Fine. Fine, then who takes care of you?”

Dean’s got nothing to say; when Sam extracts himself to make eye contact, Dean looks at him with his face full of all the little lonely things that Sam was never supposed to see. Softly, Sam adds, “I thought we were supposed to be…”

“We were. We are,” Dean relents, sweeping the hair out of Sam’s eyes. “But you told me yourself that that’s the problem, you know, back in Michigan.”

Something in Sam’s blazing gaze collapses until what’s left behind is the same frightened kid Dean caught with an armful of pill bottles he’d already started to swallow. “Whenever I try not to rely on you so much, I just end up alone.”

“I know, Sammy. Son of a bitch, I know,” says Dean.

Sam squeezes his eyes shut tight, opens them again, dots one wet kiss onto each of Dean’s eyes as soon as Dean closes them. For a horrifying handful of seconds, they shallowly breathe one another’s air, Sam’s mouth crowding in until it’s four inches from Dean’s—three, two—and then Dean snaps his chin downward and Sam is leaping out of Dean’s bed and into his own at the other end of the room. “Night, Dean,” he squeaks after an exaggerated pause.

“Night,” Dean echoes, and he knows in that instant that he’s completely out of his damn element.

-

Mounia sits three rows down from him again in Spanish the next morning, but when he sees that she’s the one manning the drama club’s ticket table at lunch, he fishes in his jean pocket for today’s grocery money and sets his jaw. “Two tickets for the winter production,” Dean tells her, holding out two tens and flashing his best smile.

To her credit, Mounia only looks a little surprised when she glances up from her economics textbook to meet his eyes. “Find a date to bring already?” she asks as she opens the lockbox, her voice light but cold.

“No, man, I’m taking my baby brother. He, uh… he’s been through a lot in the last couple months, and he loves this kind of thing.”

“Your kid brother is into Shakespeare?” she asks with a frown.

Dean’s smile fades into something softer, fonder. “He’s not really a kid anymore, I guess. He’s gonna be fourteen soon, and anyway, Sammy’s a genius.”

The hard lines of Mounia’s jaw ease up a little as she sets the textbook on the table and shuts it with a snap. “So you _are_ capable of caring about someone besides yours-s-self.”

He winces. “Okay, that’s fair, I deserved that. Look, Mounia…”

She sits with her hands folded, waiting, and Dean probably shouldn’t even bother investing in her like this when he’ll be back on the road in a few weeks: if there’s one thing he learned from playing house at Sonny’s when he was sixteen, it’s that there’s no use pretending he can ever have anything like a normal life when he has an obligation to Dad and Sammy, and after the number that losing Robin did on him, it’s been easier not to get attached. But—he’s out of his depth with Sam, Dad’s got no time for social calls, and Mounia’s _here_ , and he likes her, he really does. “I know I’ve got my issues,” he fumbles, and Mounia snorts. “But, I mean, you’re clever, and honest, and straightforward, and I admire that, you know? Most girls go out with me for shallow reasons, and I don’t know what else there is to like about me, but—I like spending time with you.”

“You act all cocky, but you’ve got the worst self-esteem I’ve ever seen,” Mounia comments. “You put on some stupid airs and defenses, but you’re still more real, more-more-more humble, than most of the wealthy jackasses in this city, and you’re witty, interesting, smart—when you’re not deliberately being stupid.” Shrugging, Dean grins sheepishly. “I’m not going to commit to somebody so closed off, but if you wanted to stay f-friends, I would like that.”

“I don’t have a lot of practice at having friends,” Dean warns her after a pause.

“Start by being honest when you can be, and try not to lie or be cheeky the rest of the time,” she advises, and Dean smiles weakly.

Mounia sits by him again in trig and physio that afternoon, though she takes off immediately at the end of the day with a casual _see you, Dean_. He figures it’s about the best he can hope for and hits the store on the way home, stocking up carefully on sale items and Sam’s favorite cereal.

The west is gorgeous in the winter, rocky hills rolling over stucco homes with red tile roofs. Now is technically the desert’s rainy season, and while Dean hasn’t seen much rain to speak of, the mountains encasing the valley town are flush with green that he knows will be gone by summer. He and Sam will be long forgotten by then, and the thought stresses him more than he’d like to admit as he lopes along, the walk easier now than a week ago when he’d started fasting.

Sam’s in a mood this afternoon, huffing into his book when Dean greets him and glaring as Dean presents the tickets. “What is this?” he asks coolly.

“ _Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet_ tickets. It’s the high school drama club’s winter production. I thought you and I could go next month.”

“We can’t _afford_ this.”

Dean sighs. Sammy’s been getting moodier and moodier as he enters the teen years, his open, radiant kid receding further into himself every day, and he doesn’t know how to work with this new Sam who fights him at every turn. “It was only ten bucks a pop, and you could use something to do besides reading and studying and watching TV all day.”

“I don’t need a babysitter.”

“No, but you do need to get out of the house and do things kids your age would—”

“Yeah, and how many meals are you going to skip to make that happen? I don’t need _that_ on my conscience, too, Dean.”

Nauseous and exhausted, Dean takes a seat adjacent to Sammy at the table, picking idly at a frayed placemat. Sam matches his stare with sparking fury in his eyes. “I’m just trying to raise you right, kiddo, and… and I’m scared I’m gonna lose you any second.”

Sam flinches, brick walls going up behind his eyes, and then like _that_ he schools his features into a neutral expression and asks what they’re doing for dinner. Dean lets the matter drop, unsure whether he _wants_ to know what Sam’s response would be if he pushed the issue.

He tries calling Dad that night, and twice more on Wednesday, but it goes to voicemail every time. Once he and Sammy have moved all their belongings (which don’t amount to more than they can carry) out of the house and checked into their shady motel of choice, he calls one more time to leave a message with the address and room number, so Dad will know where to pick them up. Sam purses his lips but says nothing.

It’s cramped: a queen and a cot, a rickety desk, and a TV with six channels on top of the dresser. There’s not really a kitchenette, but there _are_ a mini-fridge and a microwave stacked next to the little armoire, and Dean’s more than capable of making that work. Sam sets about unpacking his clothes and books neatly into the drawers of the dresser and desk, while Dean dumps the leftover food from the house beside the fridge and then flings himself next to where he’s left his duffel on one of the beds. The thin blanket on top of the sheet is scratchy, and springs from the mattress poke insistently along his back.

“I’m bored,” he announces to the room a few short minutes later.

Sammy looks over and scowls at him from where he’s now meticulously folding his T-shirts. “Go take your girlfriend out, then.”

“We broke up, actually,” Dean says nonchalantly, ignoring Sam’s startled look, “although she did say she wants to ‘stay friends,’ and I think she maybe really meant it.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. But still—too soon. Looks like you’re stuck with me for the evening, Sammy.” He grins, huge and false.

Even as Sammy rolls his eyes, an achingly open half-smile ekes its way onto his face, dimples coming out in full force. The kid still looks at Dean like this sometimes, like he can see in him some inherent goodness worth following anywhere, always—the sort of adoration he’ll grow out of someday, when he’s old enough to see the failures at Dean’s every turn. For today, though, Sam still thinks he needs him, and Dean revels in it. “I’m cool with staying in with you tonight,” Sam says, failing to mask how pleased he is by the thought of it, “but let’s go out tomorrow after school.”

“Samuel Winchester, voluntarily getting out of the house? I _never_.”

Sammy hurls a pillow at him from the other bed, but Dean keeps smirking. “Shut up, jerk. If I can’t buy you something for your eighteenth birthday, I can at least take you out to do something nice.”

Dean’s gut clenches up at that. “That’s sweet, kiddo, really, but you don’t gotta do anything for me.”

“Well, I want to, and I wanna spend time with you, so we’re going,” Sam says, holding Dean’s gaze stoutly. “I know we can’t afford admission to anything fancy, but there’s a family bar and grill nearby where kids eat free on Fridays, and I could pass as twelve to get a free meal if we go, right? And they have karaoke every weeknight starting at seven. And I did some research on hikes with nice views in the area, so if we do one of those first and watch the sunset from one of the hills—”

A little floored, Dean deflects with a laugh, “Slow down, buddy, you’re not gonna get graded on your event planning prowess here.” Sam visibly deflates at that, though, and guilt twists in Dean’s stomach. “Hey. Whatever you wanna do tomorrow sounds great, okay? Maybe just don’t pick _too_ big of a hike. We still gotta be conserving calories here until Dad gets back.”

“Yeah, ’course,” Sammy says a little breathlessly, but he’s smiling again.

Rolling his duffel to the very edge of the bed, Dean thumps the mattress until Sam, raised eyebrows and all, plunks down in the empty space next to him. “Spaghetti-O’s for dinner?” the kid asks, curling up with a thin pillow as Dean switches on the television.

“Sure, Sammy.” Pillow clutched against his chest, Sam leans his head then against Dean’s shoulder almost hesitantly, and Dean’s quick to tuck him under his arm, dragging lazy fingertips along Sammy’s arm.

The motel gets a handful of local programming stations, PBS, and, inexplicably, Game Show Network. He turns it to the Jeopardy reruns that’ll be airing for at least the next hour and feels Sam hide his smile in Dean’s chest. The room may not be much, but he can deal.

Sam drops into a doze by five o’clock, drooling a little into Dean’s Henley, but he just grins to himself and wipes Sam’s chin dry with the pad of his thumb. Lowering the volume of the station, he hunches his body over Sam’s, breathes deep, and falls off himself within minutes.

By the time he’s startled out of a foggy dream involving fingering Mounia atop a giant cake bearing the winking face of the Jeopardy host, Alex whatever, the room is dark and chilly and smells like cheap tomato sauce. Looking around wildly, he locates Sam slurping noodles out of a paper bowl at the desk and flashing Dean a wavy smile. “Time is it?” he asks, sandpaper-rough, and he clears his throat.

“Ten after eight. I made you a bowl; it should still be pretty warm,” replies Sammy promptly, switching on the desk lamp.

The light that spills into the room is dim and yellow, but Dean winces anyway. He can’t very well say he’s not hungry this late in the evening, so he accepts his ration of pasta, steels himself, and gets down to it. If he’s going to be going hiking tomorrow, he ought to at least try to get his strength up for it. “School going okay?” he asks a couple bites in.

“It’s fine.”

“Any favorite teachers?”

“They’re okay, nothing special.”

“New friends? Girls I should know about?”

“You’re hovering again,” Sam tells him pointedly.

“Just makin’ sure as your big brother that you stay out of trouble,” says Dean.

At that, Sam falls quiet for a few moments, staring impassively at the scratch-worn surface of the desk. “You’re old enough to be my legal guardian now, you know, or will be in a few hours. We could—take off, go somewhere to take care of ourselves, if you wanted to.”

Sammy’s _legal guardian_ , Jesus. Dean’s mouth suddenly feels like cotton as he flashes back to the slickness of Sam’s mouth on his in that motel room last November, crouching on his knees for his boy as Sam crowded into him in the diner bathroom stall—Sam rubbing one out on Dean’s thigh, suicidal and all of thirteen years old. “Would _you_ want to?” he asks.

After a pause, Sam just says softly, “I just want us to have enough to eat.”

And Dean’s prepared to argue the point, but last November isn’t something that they ever bring up, and he thinks Sam might really be talking about more than _just_ the food, anyway, so Dean lets it go. His bites are measured and slow as Sammy slurps the last of the marinara sauce from the bottom of his bowl and flips the page of whatever textbook he’s got open.

Knowing it’ll be the simplest way to keep the food down, Dean burrows down into the mattress when he’s finished his noodles and resolutely slows his breathing until he’s able to drift off. In the morning, there’s a hazy memory of wet warmth at his back, clutching and scrubbing down his arm, but the pressure is gone now and Sam is breathing sleep-laden and heavy in the cot, stark lines of his frail body illuminated by the chilly sunrise.

He hadn’t told Mounia his birthday was coming up, but she somehow already knows about it when she greets him in Spanish with a rare smile and a small gift bag. “I help out in the main office during my zero hour, so I n-noticed your birth date when I was processing your enrollment paperwork,” she explains in her usual unselfconscious way.

“You didn’t have to get me anything,” says Dean, a little stunned, as he tugs the card free from the top of the bag and rips open the envelope. In the bag are two cassette tapes, a Black Sabbath album he doesn’t recognize and a tape labeled in Mounia’s own handwriting. “Mounia, this… you made me a mixtape?”

“It was a less awkward idea back when we were still dating, but you’re still going to like the songs or not as much as you already would have when I made it, so what the hell, right? There’s mostly rock on there, but also a few, uh, alternative bands I think you might like if you keep an open mind.”

Dean smirks. “I would kiss you for this if you hadn’t broken up with me.”

“You r-really need to practice some healthy ways to show platonic affection,” Mounia says seriously as the bell rings and she shifts to face the front of the room.

Not for the first time, it strikes him that someone as confident as Mounia chooses _Dean_ to spend time with without even really knowing him—that she didn’t already seem to have friends to occupy her when he first moved to town and started making eyes at her. He can understand her disdain for the snobs they go to school with—God, Dean hates wealthy suburbs, it’s a good thing Dad doesn’t take cases in them often—but it still seems unbelievable that she would single Dean out as the exception, even with his threadbare flannel and holey jeans. Girls usually go for Dean because of the swagger; Mounia pretty much dumped him because of it, wants whatever she thinks must be underneath.

“We should celebrate,” she informs him after class as she’s snapping her backpack shut with a click.

“I… uh. I can’t tonight. Sammy wants to spend the day with me, and…”

“Sam’s your brother. Of course,” says Mounia, and she looks like she means it. “I’m busy this weekend, but why don’t you come over for dinner after rehearsal on Monday? We should be done around five, maybe. Practices usually start to run long close to a p-performance.”

“Yeah. Dinner. That sounds great, Mounia, thanks,” he tells her, swallowing thickly.

Lunch goes down rough, and he ditches his last couple classes to channel the restlessness into a handful more job applications. At the tired-looking diner three blocks from Sammy’s school, Dean’s last stop before the middle school lets out, an impatient hostess informs him that they’re not accepting walk-ins this week, but to come back next Wednesday or Thursday to participate in on-site interviews and would he like her to have an assistant manager pencil him in for a time slot? With a little lurch of his stomach, he signs himself up for Thursday at three-thirty, jotting the time down on the back of one of their business cards.

He surprises Sammy with the news as well as his presence when the kid gets out of class, and Sam lights up with a vibrancy Dean wishes he saw more of these days, like when Sam was younger. “I knew it—I knew you could do it!” Sam insists, flinging his arms around Dean’s middle with a vice grip, the frayed straps of his backpack swinging violently from side to side.

“Hey, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. All I did was answer an open call for applicants. There’s no guarantee they’re gonna be at all interested in hiring me once they start talking to me.”

“Yeah, but half the battle is getting in the door so you can show them how hard you’re willing to work. They’ll be crazy not to believe in you once they actually meet you and hear you out.” Sam relinquishes his hold on Dean, dropping a rare kiss to his cheek up on his tiptoes before drawing back. “I’m so proud of you. Happy birthday, Dean.”

He deflects with a smirk. “Thanks, bitch.”

“ _You’re_ a bitch,” scowls Sam.

“Language.”

“Fine. You’re a _jerk_.”

“Better,” Dean concedes, ruffling Sammy’s hair and grinning fondly before he lets the kid alone.

It’s a ten-minute walk to the nearest city bus stop, where they board the first of three buses to get them close to the hike Sam’s picked out. When Dean shows him the cassette tapes from Mounia, Sam fishes out of his backpack the beat-up Walkman he uses to block out Dad’s music on driving days, and they pass the ride squabbling over the headphones and debating the relative merits of Mounia’s taste in music as they take turns listening to the mixtape in thirty-second snippets. It doesn’t entirely hit the mark for Dean, but Sammy loves the thing, bopping his head along with tracks labeled things like AFI and Alice in Chains and Red Hot Chili Peppers in Mounia’s tight uppercase. He bounces his leg in time to the music, and every so often when the bus hits a sharp turn or bumpy stretch of road, his thigh rocks against Dean’s through their jeans.

The last bus drops them a few minutes’ walk from the base of the mountain Sam’s picked out. Dean raises an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you want to climb this whole thing today.”

“What? No, we don’t have enough water to reach the summit safely. There should be a plateau overlooking the valley that’s supposed to take a little more than an hour to reach, going uphill. See that wooden cross about halfway up, to the left?”

He does: it’s a pinprick of white against a backdrop of tree trunks and rocks. They set off for it, Dean tucking the thermos of water Sam passes him into his bag. It’s room-temp, but he doesn’t mind: the Southwest is arid and lukewarm even at the end of January, but they still might start to feel chilly once they start gaining altitude.

Though Dean only feels a little weak, they go slower than usual, and Sam doesn’t question him when he says they need to save their strength until Dad brings back a new credit card. He’s glad for the time with Sammy—to see how strong the kid’s growing and hear him bicker and chatter at Dean’s side—but Dean’s never really understood how Sam can whine nonstop about hunting, resist all of Dad’s prescribed training regimens, yet derive so much joy from nature hikes and soccer clubs. You’d think he wouldn’t mind sparring or running laps so much when he’s such a sports enthusiast, or that he wouldn’t be so into this stuff and would universally hate athletic activity, or something. For Dean’s part, staying in shape has always been something he’s done out of necessity, not for the sake of itself: he doesn’t mind it, even joined the wrestling team when Sonny took him in to keep up the skill, but he can’t understand the point of honing all that muscle and power with no intention of putting it into something constructive.

Sam’s in his element, though, grinning up at Dean from under his stupid bangs as he points out species of plants they come across and rattles off facts about desert wildlife. By the time they reach the plateau with the white cross, Sam’s not breathing half as hard as Dean is, though the same sweat stinging in Dean’s eyes is curling up the ends of Sammy’s hair. Dean eases himself onto his haunches with his back against the cross; Sam takes a long drink of water before flopping down next to him, laying his head on Dean’s shoulder and squirming to get comfortable.

Sam says they’ve got maybe half an hour before sunset, so they settle in, Dean slinging an arm around Sammy’s shoulders as Sam pulls out his Walkman again. Already, the sky is starting to streak colors and cast purple-striped shadows over the valley below the drop, lights beginning to peek out from houses and along highways. Dean can make out arrays of dime-size buildings with their stucco and red tile layered across the dips of rock and forest, all greened up now that it's supposedly the rainy season (not that there's been much of any rain in Nevada since he and Sam got in). The neatly patterned street lamps lining the interstates diffuse out into the purplish mist hovering blanket-like over the basin, scattering near the edges where the hills start to rise, sprawling mansions and museums embedded along the rocky inclines. 

It feels like a long time since they’ve actually sat and watched a sunset—he’s usually too anxious to really take the time out for them, these days. Sam feels thin but warm and solid nestled into Dean’s side, more of his sweat soaking into Dean’s hoodie, the stench of it salty and cloying. He almost starts ribbing Sam about it, but the geek seems so at peace sitting there humming along to Counting Crows with his headphones jammed under his ear and digging into Dean’s shoulder, and Dean sees this open side of him so rarely these days that he doesn’t want the moment to end. When he pulls Sammy in a little closer and rubs his knuckles in circles on his arm, Sam tilts his head up to _really_ look at him with his hair drying at odd angles and his lazy smile all shiny and pink, and Dean loves his brother so much, so much.

His pulse is picking up, he can feel it, and Sam’s breath starts to quicken as his mouth parts on a taut “o,” and he is everything that Dean smells and hears and feels. His free hand is steady as he reaches to set it on Sam’s hip, and where Sam’s shirts have ridden up and Dean’s palm unexpectedly connects with a strip of flesh, Sammy’s thin waist jumps at the contact. Sucking in a quick breath, Dean freezes with his hand half under Sam’s shirts where his brother is sweat-sticky and flinching, and he stares at the flush rising on Sam’s cheeks, the way his moles pop out against the pink skin.

“Sammy,” he mutters. His fingertips dip down and graze the waistband of Sam’s jeans as Sam’s shaky hand moves to cover Dean’s through the fabric of his shirts, urging it to press harder, lower—but Dean holds it where it is, pads of his fingers skimming just underneath the hem of Sammy’s briefs.

“We’re gonna miss the sunset,” Sam chokes out, now staring—Dean thinks—at Dean’s mouth.

Neither moves for a long minute, Dean’s pulse hammering out of his whole skin as Sam’s bare tummy continues to twitch under Dean’s calloused hand. By the time Dean rips his gaze skyward and smoothes Sam’s T-shirt back over his waist, the sun has dropped away for the night, and the first traces of orange are beginning to fade from the sky.

They’re both quiet on the trek downhill, Dean’s eyes drifting anxiously over Sam’s skinny form as he skirts nimbly around rocks and weeds along the path. Shit. He’s messed around with Sam before, that’s true, but kissing Sammy last year had been about comforting him: anything else Dean may have felt he’d treated as incidental. This—today—adrenaline’s still thudding through him even as they reach flat ground and catch their first bus en route to the restaurant, Sam knocking ankles with him under the seat and blushing prettily.

Since when does Dean even think that kind of shit about Sam? It’s not necessarily untrue—he’s got Winchester charm same as Dean does—but Sammy’s just a little kid, for Christ’s sake.

At dinner, Dean limits his order to a plain cheeseburger and water from the tap, but Sam cashes in his free kid’s meal for more than he can eat and sneaks Dean fries and swigs of his milkshake whenever the wait staff isn’t looking. By the time seven o’clock rolls around, they’re chatting normally again over a vicious game of footsie under the table, and Sammy smirks and hops up from the booth as soon as the assistant manager on duty starts to announce that it’s karaoke hour.

“You little shit!” Dean calls out, but he’s laughing. He kicks back in his seat and tosses another couple fries in his mouth as Sam confers with the woman briefly before the opening bars of a Soundgarden song begin to play from the tinny speakers. Sam apparently chose carefully: it’s one of the few bands he and Dean can usually somewhat agree on, even if it’s not among either one’s absolute favorites.

Sam keeps catching his eye and trying to beckon him over to the little mike stand he’s singing into, but Dean just puts up a dismissive hand with a smile and listens to Sammy only slightly butchering Chris Cornell’s vocals, his voice off-key and cracking, but not terribly so. Rock music, a guilt-free stomach full of grease, and his little brother close and happy: the anxiety hasn’t entirely melted off, but this much Dean can work with and still end up mostly okay.

As soon as they get back to the motel, he jerks off furiously in the shower, tries to think about handjobs from Mounia but can’t, even dips deep into the spank bank for his hazy-edged memories of kissing Robin and only serves to make himself sad as well as freaked out or whatever it is he’s already feeling about Sammy. Giving it up, he pounds a fist into the mildew-laced tiles of the little stall, scrubs his face under the spray, and emerges as soon as he locks down a smirk so that Sam won’t have to worry. Kid doesn’t need that, has enough shit to deal with already.

“You did good today, Sammy,” he says carelessly as he’s fishing for halfway-clean clothes, and Sam rubs his cheek and limbs like a damn cat against the queen bed where he’s sprawled out and smiles. He’s listening to Mounia’s tape again; by now, Dean can recognize the track leaking faintly from Sam’s earphones. “Now get outta my bed.”

“But I _always_ get stuck with the cot.”

“Yeah, because you’re, like, half my height. Talk to me again when you reach six feet tall.”

“You know, just for that, someday I’m going to turn out taller than you so I can throw it in _your_ face all the time,” Sam huffs, but he sits up with a grunt, stuffing his Walkman in the breast pocket of his sleep shirt.

“I’ll believe that when I see it, Sammy.”

Sam scowls, but when he pulls himself upright, he stretches his arms upward for a long moment and then starts to twirl slowly, ridiculously, humming along to the tape. His eyes fall shut as Dean trips himself and staggers around for a second pulling his sweatpants the rest of the way up. “Is that—Sammy, are you _dancing_?”

“I felt happy today,” Sam answers, now swaying in place. “I don’t want it to end yet.”

The day, or the feeling? Dean doesn’t ask, but his gut clenches up at how uninhibited Sammy looks like this, and suddenly all over again he’s petrified of waking up tomorrow to find Sam cold on the ground and empty of everything that makes him Sammy, and Dean can’t survive that happening; Sam feels light-years away swirling his hips there on the floor with his arms waving lazily in straight, skyward lines, without the assurance of his pulse syncing to Dean’s, skin to skin.

Fleetingly, he wonders how much Sam would want to give him to attain that closeness, what might happen _right now_ if Dean slipped his hands back onto the naked skin of Sammy’s waist, pinned him up to the wall at eye level and crowded in until—and he can’t do that to Sam, but his kiddo genuinely almost died once already on Dean’s watch, and he—

“Something’s wrong. What’s wrong?” Dean’s eyes snap up to find Sam’s open and alarmed, his arms resting back at his sides and the headphones off and looped around his neck. “Dean, please, don’t shut down, you _always_ shut down and I never know what I did to make you hurt…”

“Sammy, no. You haven’t—you’re perfect, okay? I was just… you scare the hell out of me sometimes when I think about you trying to, to, to check out again, but you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Oh,” says Sam faintly, and then, “It was stupid, okay, and I won’t do it again. Please, let’s not talk about it. It’s still your birthday for another—three and a half hours.”

“Yeah. Yeah, and I’m getting to spend it with my favorite geek brother.”

“You don’t _have_ another geek brother,” Sam points out sullenly.

Dean smirks as he throws himself ass-first onto the queen and teases, “Quit fishing for compliments and come to bed, geek-boy.”

“Seriously? It’s not even nine yet.”

“Yeah, and I wanna watch a few hours of infomercials and syndicated game shows with my little bro before my birthday is over. Get in here, weirdo. Bring the remote.”

Sam does, rolling his eyes fondly as he burrows under the sheets, and if he has anything to say about it when Dean cuddles up to him an hour later and presses his shuddering shoulders into Sam’s torso, he keeps it to himself.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second and final chapter is up! Part 3 of the 'verse will likely be _even longer_ than this fic was - I've got nearly 2000 words done so far, and even that barely scratches the surface of the stuff the story's going to accomplish - and then I'm not sure how many more sequels will come after that, at least one more but possibly three (for a total 4-6 stories in the 'verse). Forever thanks to **publia** for fixing my entire life/this chapter.

They start sharing the queen after Dean’s birthday. When Sam pushes his library copy of _A People’s History of the United States_ a few inches up the desk and jumps onto the mattress at Dean’s feet the following night, he shrugs and insists it’s too cold by the window to sleep alone in the cot comfortably, and Dean doesn’t point out that nighttime temps here haven’t yet dropped below the forties or that Sam did just fine without having to share body heat back in freakin’ New Hampshire this past Christmas. Sam has always run colder than Dean does, and his freezing-ass feet leach all the heat from Dean’s calves where Sam plants them, but still, he kind of likes how closely Sam nestles in, the bracket of his knees around Dean’s and the wedge of his elbow under Dean’s neck.

On Sunday, Mounia startles Dean with a phone call confirming their plans for the next night: he’d swapped his cell number for her landline back when he first moved to town, but they’ve never actually made use of them before now. Her stutter—usually so faint that Dean hardly notices it—is more pronounced over the phone, worsening every time he has to ask her to repeat a phrase he doesn’t catch through his crackly connection. “We started observing R-R-Ramadan a few d-days ago, so dinner won’t be until a-after evening prayers when the fast b-breaks at sunset. But honestly, rehearsal may not end u-until around then in the first place. I c-can come by your house to get you if—”

“Naw, that’s okay, I can chill in the commons or somewhere until you finish up,” says Dean hastily.

“A-are you sure? I’d hate to keep you there w-waiting for me for so long. Rehearsals are closed t-to the public.”

“Yeah, I’ll borrow Sammy’s Walkman so I can listen to that Black Sabbath album some more. I can keep entertained no problem. It’s cool.”

There’s a pause, and Dean can’t tell whether she’s smiling or frowning at the other end of the line until Mounia says, “So you l-l-liked it.” Smiling, then. “I’m glad. Was the m-mixtape a no-go? I w-was afraid that might happen.”

“Kind of, for me, but Sammy adores it. He’s been listening to it on a loop practically the whole weekend—gets to the end and rewinds it just to start the thing over again. I’m giving it to him for his collection.” He smirks in the general direction of the half-open bathroom door; tendrils of steam from Sam’s shower are beginning to wisp outward through the archway. “The two of you can nerd out about it after we see the big show this weekend.”

“Oh, _stop_ , Dean W-W-Winchester,” Mounia says, but adds, “I’ll look f-forward to meeting him. When we g-get done t-tomorrow, I’ll come find you and d-drive us both b-back to my house. I can let you into the d-d-drama room after p-physiology if you want to hang out th-there in the meant-t-time.”

“I thought you said it was a closed rehearsal.”

There’s a hint of laughter in Mounia’s voice as she informs him, “We u-usually hold all our meetings in the auditorium within a-at least a month of each p-production, so that we can finalize the blocking and the c-crew has plenty of time to as-assemble the sets they’ve been b-building. Had you thought I was p-p-penciling in r-reservations to get the room to myself before practice for s-sexual t-trysts?”

“What, no, course not— _what_?” says Dean, his face dropping, and Mounia’s laugh rings out crisply over the line.

“Do me a f-favor tomorrow by n-neglecting to mention those to m-my family, by the way. My parents are p-pretty ideologically… I think the w-word you might u-use for them is ‘p-progressive,’ but even th-they, I think, wouldn’t accept m-marriage outside of our faith, let alone s-sex outside m-marriage _and_ Islam. I’ve told them you’re a friend.”

“I—yeah, no, yeah, totally platonic, got it. No problem.” Mounia sighs a little as Dean covers himself with a cough. “Anyway, that’s true now, isn’t it? That—you know, us being friends?”

“I-I-I would like to th-think so, yes,” Mounia stammers out, and Dean’s grateful she isn’t here to see his smile.

He occupies himself after classes let out the following afternoon with Black Sabbath and a school copy of _Othello_ that he skips lunch to check out of the library. According to Mounia, the play this weekend parodies it as well as _Romeo and Juliet_ , and although their school’s English classes all apparently chose _Othello_ as this year’s Shakespearean installment in the curriculum, they’d completed it sometime last semester, long before Dean had enrolled here. _Everybody_ knows the basics of good ol’ R’n‘J, but all Dean knows about _Othello_ is that there’s a character in it named Desdemona and that Mounia’s been cast to play her role this weekend, meaning Dean had better study up.

It’s slow going, but it helps that he checked out the special retard edition with all the annotations that break down the dialogue for people like Dean. He’s actually kind of getting into it by the time a tap to his shoulder scares the actual living hell out of him. “Warn a guy next time, Jesus!” he huffs at Mounia once he’s regained his breath and swiveled in his seat at the piano bench to face her.

She’s smirking when she tells him, “You didn’t seem able to h-hear me when I tried to get your attention. Is that _Othello_? I’m t-touched.”

“If you’re gonna play the title character in this thing, I figure I should at least know what her deal was in the play it’s based off of before I show up,” says Dean, shrugging.

Mounia’s lips pull up in a thin, tight smile. “Technically, Desdemona and Juliet are both title characters, and the protagonist is this original character called C-Constance—but you’re sweet. I will give you that. Are you ready to go?”

He dog-ears the page he’s reading and jams the text and the cassette player both into his schoolbag. After Mounia locks up behind them, Dean hovers uncomfortably in the corridor as she returns the room key to the main office and then tails her through the near-empty parking lot until they reach a tidy-looking little Pontiac that she opens with a couple absent clicks of a button. “Shoot,” she mumbles with a frown at the dashboard as the time—just after half past six—pops up on the display. “We’re going to be d-driving when it’s time to perform the _Maghrib_ , so it’ll take some extra time for me to complete it when we get home. Would it be terribly weird for me to set you up with my parents in the living room until I f-finish? I’ll prefer privacy for it, but they’re liable to in-interrogate you without realizing that they’re overstepping, and I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

Dean chews his lip for a second as he buckles himself in; he’s so used to the Impala’s bench seat that the motion feels foreign. “Little uncomfortable, yeah, but I don’t want to—intrude, or whatever, or, like, disrespect…”

“Don’t worry about it. It won’t be that b-bothersome.” Jimmying her car key until the car engine purrs to life, Mounia’s quiet for a few moments but then adds in a nervous rush, “I know we don’t really know each other all that well, Dean, and—about what you s-said?—you know, I don’t have a lot of practice at having friends, either. But I do know that I don’t want to have to-to-to skirt around the religion thing anytime our cultural differences come up. I do more than enough of that o-out in public every day already.”

She toots her horn in greeting at the driver of a passing Lincoln—another drama clubber, Dean figures—as she rounds one last bend to turn out of the parking lot. He swallows. “Why is that, though?”

Eyebrows creasing, Mounia glances at him and then back to the road, and she sounds genuinely baffled with him when she asks, “Why is it easier not to attract the attention of my racist neighbors in a w-well-to-do, predominantly white and Christian city?”

“No, no, that already goes without saying. What I meant is, why _don’t_ you have tons of friends already? I know people at this school are assholes, but all your fellow drama and band nerds seem to really like you. I don’t see these people singling you out to pick on the way they always do to Sammy. I’m a complete—I mean, a _complete_ dick most of the time, and it seems to me like you could have had anybody you wanted, but instead…”

“Is that honestly what you th-think of yourself?” Dean looks away, counts red cars and red tile roofs through the passenger-side window, and Mounia sounds like Sam when she lets out this big, ancient sigh. “Sure, people don’t _hate_ me, but that doesn’t mean they don’t give me plenty of reasons to feel isolated from them. My mother,” she adds with a snort, and her voice gets faster and wobblier, “w-would call that ‘othering’—her research is all about, like, the e-evolution of Islamic scholarship within the social-historical c-context of Middle Eastern and Asian Pacific societies that practice it, so we heard a lot of buzzwords about it growing up. She t-teaches anthropology up at the university; both my parents work at UNLV; Dad is a lab manager for some biochemistry professor, and Mom just secured t-tenure when I was a freshman.”

Dean whistles. “I know it probably sounds like I’m just saying this, but that _really_ does sound really interesting.”

She sneers a little at that. “They’re full of talk about how some Islamic scholars justify m-misogyny and homophobia by drawing false analogies to adultery that aren’t actually supported anywhere by the Quran or the prophets, but they call my sister and me _fasiq_ o-or even _kafir_ for doing any of the things they tell the world Muslims would be right to embrace. My parents are just as flawed of people as anyone, b-believe me.”

“I’m sorry,” he tells her for lack of a better sentiment to give, and Mounia’s eyes soften. “For what it’s worth, um, I don’t know hardly nothin’ about Islam, but I’d be happy to be your sounding board if you ever just want to—hash out some of the mixed signals with somebody, or something.”

“You’re sweet,” she says again, fondly, “e-even if you _do_ try very hard not to be. Yeah, the early writings and teachings actually e-encourage sexual expression within clearly defined relationships—most of us interpret that to mean written marital contracts, but they don’t _have_ to be, or at least that’s literally what my mother wrote her dissertation about. Unfortunately, there have been a lot of reactionary attitudes to things like imperial r-rule or religious persecution that have made people try to regain dominance by perverting—this is us r-right here, by the way; try to be quiet on the way in, Mom and Dad might still be finishing up their _salaah_ as we’re coming in.”

“No problem,” Dean assures her as Mounia pulls into the drive of a stucco home right along the main road, sprawling out in between a Mexican restaurant and what looks to be a law firm.

“That was o-our mistake, actually,” Mounia adds suddenly, and Dean meets her eyes again. “Not c-clearly defining our expectations before jumping into the sex. My fault: I think I remember being the one to maul you against the l-lockers after physiology two days after you introduced yourself.”

She’s grinning a little, so he grins back as he tosses the car door open. “Oh, don’t even worry. It was a, uh, _memorable_ couple of weeks, anyway, and I think I might actually prefer things the way they worked out.”

“Still: sorry. I _d-d-did_ use you as a vehicle for religious identity-searching without your kn-knowledge or consent. If it’s any consolation, I’ve been praying on it,” Mounia says, remarkably casually, and Dean is so taken aback that they’ve reached the top of the walkway and are tiptoeing into the house, window of opportunity lost, by the time he could even begin to formulate a witty retort.

The front door opens up into a foyer the size of Dean and Sammy’s whole motel room, and he follows Mounia through it and up the staircase on their left. He can hear murmuring in a language he doesn’t understand—Arabic? But Mounia’s family is Indian, not Middle Eastern—somewhere off in the back of the house as they trod through an upstairs hall and past the third door on the left. “You can s-sit at my desk. I’ll be back after I wash up,” Mounia whispers and closes the door behind Dean as he pads across the plush carpet.

He starts pulling out the Walkman, then falters and puts it away again, opting to work through more of _Othello_ in silence. When Mounia comes back in to pray, he trains his eyes unmovingly onto the text even as her soft, rhythmic speech and the rustling of fabric break his focus.

“All right,” she tells him finally, standing and reaching back to unwrap her headscarf.

He swallows and averts his eyes. “That wasn’t… was that Arabic?”

“Yes, but I’m not fluent, a-although my parents are. We usually speak Urdu at home, but we’ll use English whenever we have guests over.”

“And you’re bothering to take Spanish at the school _why_?”

Shrugging, Mounia says, “I live in Nevada. There’s a growing Hispanic p-population in the American Southwest that I want to be able to communicate with when we cross paths, and I a-already know that I’m good at picking up languages.”

“So you definitely want to stay here after you finish school, then?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have any p-particular reason _not_ to. I know I _don’t_ want to attend UNLV, with my parents and sister all here, but th-there’s no place in particular where I feel like I would belong. Even in cities with strong Indian or Muslim presences, I don’t think I would i-identify with the communal experience of ethnicity and religion there, because my relationship to my heritage h-has always been such an individualized, Westernized thing. It doesn’t… _w-w-work_ ; it doesn’t _fit_.”

“I get that,” says Dean, and Mounia looks skeptical until he goes on, “Ever since I was little—like, _really_ little—we’ve never lived in one place for longer than a few months. Sammy has this big dream of settling down and finding some big picket-fence, apple-pie life somewhere, but we’ve lived in enough towns all over the lower forty-eight, and they all feel like pit stops to me. Starting to think there ain’t anywhere I’m built to belong in.”

She scrutinizes him for a long moment with squinted eyes and worry lines carving up her forehead. “I’m grateful for you that you have your b-brother,” Mounia says finally, puffy dark hair cascading down her shoulders. “I think home can be people more than p-places, sometimes, and everybody needs that. Come on, let’s go down for dinner; you must be starved by now. It’s after seven a-already.”

They’ve prepared lamb kebabs flavored with cumin and cayenne and half a dozen other spices that Dean’s never had justification to buy for himself before. He wolfs it down, much to the delight of Mounia’s mother, but Dean finds himself regretting it once his stomach starts turning over and his limbs are going weak after dinner, up in Mounia’s room.

And he could hide it: he knows how. He could steady his heart rate and his breathing until he finds a lull in the conversation at which to bid Mounia goodnight, walk a safe couple blocks down the street, and empty his stomach behind some deserted 9-to-5 outfit—so Dean doesn’t know why he uses Mounia’s bathroom instead, and when she starts to apologize and offers to take him out for something American instead, he’s got no clue why he interrupts her to say raggedly, “It’s all right. Dinner didn’t make me sick; the food was fantastic. …It’s me. I’m—I fucked it up.”

She’s hovering in the doorway with a confused little furrow to her eyebrows, half in the bathroom and half hanging back with her heels on the plush purple carpet of her bedroom, when Dean starts to laugh. Dribble of bile spilling down his chin, Dean mops at his mouth with the elbow of his Henley and flushes the toilet, still hunched above it on his knees and chuckling full-bellied. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he wheezes as clear water swirls back into the basin, fresh, amnesiac. “Probably feelin’ real glad right about now that you dumped my crazy ass so fast, huh?”

“Dean, you didn’t… s-screw…” Mounia breaks off with a cough, curling her fingertips with their quick-bitten nails around the painted wood of the doorframe, then tries again. “It isn’t your fault if you…”

“It’s my fault if I chuck up everything I eat on purpose.” The words pop out in a rush before Dean really has time to recognize what the fuck he’s confessing to here. It feels funny to say it out loud, like he’s dreaming or something and gets to have a do-over where it won’t be true, yet, because no one here will _know_ yet.

“Do you?”

A second or two pass before Dean figures out what she’s asking. He flips down the lid of the toilet and sits back against the cold ceramic of the bathtub, digging his heels into the tiled floor. “All right, maybe not everything. Just—sometimes. Whenever things with…”

But he can’t tell her about being broke, or the credit cards, or Dad taking off for weeks at a time and leaving them to sort out their own messes, and the weight of everything he can’t say crashes down on him then, crouching there on the floor of one of Mounia’s four bathrooms as a dull flicker of recognition crosses her face. He flinches when she eases through the doorway toward him, but Mounia ignores it and slowly pads over in her bright, fuzzy slippers, turning to sink onto her haunches. Even when Dean flinches again, she sets a very careful hand over one of his shoulder blades and winds her fingers into the layers of fabric. A moment later, he realizes she’s kneading soft little circles into his back and urging him down—into her lap?—but he stiffens his back and keeps upright.

“Okay, so y-you’re doing this intentionally,” Mounia concedes after a long pause. Her hand’s starting to feel kind of nice there at his back, even though it’s all clammy. “That still doesn’t make it your f-fault. You’re still… you’re _sick_ , Dean, just for a different r-reason.”

“That’s one word for it, all right,” Dean scoffs, but she starts shaking her head vigorously.

“I don’t mean it as an insult. I mean—you n-need _help_. You deserve—”

“I don’t deserve bupkis! So then… and, you know, I figure if I just don’t _eat_ anything, nothin’ gets wasted on me, because every time I give in and think it’s okay to keep something down… but then…” He’s wringing his hands, he realizes; his voice is wavering threateningly. When did that happen?

“Dean… you deserve _food_.” He doesn’t answer that, because how can he? “If it’s that… if you think that you’re—you’re not, um, o-overweight.”

Abruptly laughing at that, Dean’s afraid he’s startled Mounia enough to break her or something, judging by the look on her face. “It’s _not_ about my—my self-image, or whatever.”

“Okay. I just wondered—I mean, you never would want to t-take your clothes off. I thought you were—embarrassed—by how you l-look.”

He smiles, a frail thing. “I’m not embarrassed. I promise. It’s not…” Scrubbing a hand over his face, he muses, “I’m a real piece of work, huh?”

“No more than anyone else is,” she tells him solemnly, and if he’s supposed to find that comforting, he doesn’t, but he can at least appreciate the intent. “Listen, I-I don’t have a whole lot of experience with eating d-disorders—”

“Oh, is _that_ what’s wrong with me?”

“It makes me feel incredibly sad for you when you put yourself d-down like that,” Mounia says, and he rolls his eyes hugely but shuts up nonetheless. She gives it a moment before continuing, “I want to… do something for you, help you, but I don’t know how, and I know you must not t-trust me with anything of that magnitude when we really barely know each other.”

Dean feels a flash of guilt, then, coiling cool and slimy. “Mounia, it isn’t like that.”

“No, I know it must be, but it’s to be e-expected, so I don’t mind. You don’t have to confide in me about this one; I won’t push. Just—does your brother know, or your dad?”

“Are you friggin’ kidding me? I can’t put this on Sammy. And if Dad ever found out—he wouldn’t be all chill and zen about it like you’re being right now, I can tell you that for a fact.”

“Is there _anyone_ who knows, or wh-whom you can tell?”

Picking at the hole over one of his knees, Dean shrugs. “Sonny knows. He’s like a—a social worker or something, took me in a couple years ago when I got into some trouble. They probably train them to figure out shit like that; there wasn’t any hiding it, and I’m _good_ at hiding things. And—and I think Pastor Jim might know, or maybe even Uncle Bobby, since we’ve stayed with them before when Dad was gone for work, but neither of ‘em ever said anything to me or Dad about it if they noticed anything.”

“I want you to do something for me,” Mounia implores, and Dean rolls his eyes again, knows what’s coming. “I want you to c-call one of these guys and tell them you’re having a hard time and tell them what’s going on. I want you to be specific about… about the v-vomiting. Will you do that for me?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“Will you promise me?”

She sounds so earnest, and for some reason she hasn’t walked out on Dean’s bullshit yet, and he fidgets under the weight of her stare. “Yeah, _okay_ , whatever!”

Though she doesn’t seem entirely satisfied with his answer, Mounia gives his shoulder a little squeeze and doesn’t ask again. She rests her head on his chest and holds on tight around Dean’s shoulders, and his stomach clenches on empty.

-

Mounia insists on getting him a clean toothbrush and on offering to take him out for something else to eat, but she also insists that she won’t be offended if he turns her down. “But it’s my treat i-if you want it,” she adds, and only then does he say reluctantly, “If we go pick something up somewhere, do you mind if we pick out something I can bring back to Sammy?”

“Of course we can. Does he like ice cream? Th-there’s a Baskin-Robbins nearby where we can stop before I take you home.”

He tries turning down the ride, but Mounia is adamant about not letting him walk back when he’s not at full strength, until finally he blurts, “It’s just—we had to move when rent on the house came due last week. We’ll be fine once Dad gets his, uh, paycheck for this job he’s working right now, but… we’re crashing for now in a motel a few blocks from the high school.”

Although her eyes crease up a little, Mounia just says, “That’s fine. Just tell me how to g-get there when we’re ready to head out.”

“Thanks,” Dean mutters, averting his eyes.

At the motel, he hands Sammy his sugar cone before burrowing into the bed to focus on keeping down the slice of cherry pie Mounia got for Dean. This time, he actually lets himself think about _why_ it’s so hard to keep food down: he definitely does the puking thing by choice—he remembers the first time when he was a kid, and Dean definitely wasn’t nauseous then—but he is now. What’s that about, anyway? It’s partly psychosomatic, probably, but partly also that his appetite gets borked anytime he goes too long without proper meals. After all, Dean was okay to eat until their card maxed out a couple short weeks ago.

He can call it fasting all he wants, tell himself he’s going without for Sammy’s benefit, but he’s not helping anybody whenever he retches up what he’s already consumed. It’s pure, selfish punishment, and if Sam knew—if Dad…

“What’s up with you today? Strike out on your date or something?”

As Dean rips himself from his thoughts, Sam plunks himself down next to him on the mattress and idly flicks Dean’s knee with the knuckles of an index finger. Groaning, he rolls onto his stomach. “Wasn’t a date.”

“Yeah, like you’ve ever made _friends_ with a girl in your life.”

“Leave me alone, Sammy.”

“And go where? We live in a one-room motel—”

“I said leave it!”

Sam falls quiet at that, and when Dean turns his face to smash his cheek on the skinny pillow and look at him, Sammy’s eyes are round and startled—even afraid? Another wave of nausea hits, then, that’s got nothing to do with the pie he ate, and he tries to tug the blankets free from beneath the kid to usher him under them. “I’m sorry, kiddo. I’m sorry. C’mere.”

Carefully, Sammy folds himself underneath and holds himself rigid even as he shuffles right up into Dean’s space with a little pouty exhale. “Missed you,” Sam admits, and Dean thrums all over at the closeness.

“Geek,” he sighs, but he’s smiling.

“Oh my god, you’re such an asshole.”

“I’m sorry, what was that you just called me?”

“You’re such a _jerk_ ,” Sam amends with a roll of his eyes.

“That’s better, bitch,” says Dean smugly. Sam hits him for that—just a lazy, lame whack with the back of his hand—but when Dean moves to hit back, the kid snatches up his palm and threads their fingers together, pulling their clasped fists up to his own face. Dean inhales raggedly. He tries to catch Sammy’s eye, but Sam is looking fixedly downward with a sweet little blush tingeing his cheeks and neck. “Uh, Sammy?”

“Yeah, Dean.”

Sam’s voice wavers, but he still sounds about a hundred times more collected than Dean feels. He’s being stupid: nothing’s even happening. He overanalyzes shit, Dean _knows_ he does this, that’s why he tries so hard to bury things instead, because if he didn’t he’d go crazy, like now, with the flush of Sammy’s cheek hot as a brand against his knuckles—“This should… shouldn’t we…?”

“Stop that. Stop judging,” says Sam, gnawing on his bottom lip, but as he releases it, he scoots forward and tilts his chin up so that his mouth bumps clumsily onto Dean’s. It’s all happening so fast—Sammy’s thin lips dipping in around Dean’s immobile ones, his free hand skating up to rub Dean’s neck, sweat everywhere.

Dean wrenches back jerkily and gapes at Sammy, who’s starting to get a defiant little downturn to one corner of his mouth. Compulsively licking at his lips, Dean’s startled to find that they taste ice cream-sweet—that the remnants of Sam’s spittle, the evidence, tastes _good_ , _like last time_ , he realizes with a jolt. “The hell is wrong with you, Sammy!”

Even as Sam’s eyes crumple up, he locks his jaw and his sneer in place and squeaks out, “We’ve kissed before. Just because _you_ want to pretend like it never happened doesn’t undo it.”

“You don’t get to play that card,” Dean warbles. His hand is still locked up between Sam’s cheek and his palm, and he digs his fingers hard as he can into Sam’s cheekbone. “No, no, no, you don’t get to _use_ that on me. That wasn’t like this. That was about… it wasn’t about _taking_ what we _wanted_ , Jesus fuck.”

“Oh, you _didn’t_ want it?” Sammy scoffs with a hurt little undertone that Dean squeezes his eyes shut tight against. “Poor _martyr_ Dean Winchester, givin’ away make-out sessions because he’s so _self-sacrificing_.”

“Because you could have died! I thought you were dying, I thought _I_ was dying, I felt… _every_ time I take my eyes off you…”

“I didn’t ask to feel like that. I don’t need you hovering all the time, trying to fix me. You weren’t supposed to find out.”

“Well, I was bound to figure it out one way or the other if I’d’ve come home to find your stupid note on the toilet and your bod—your dead bo—your…”

When Sam leans in to cut him off with another kiss, Dean’s leaky eyes fly open to find his brother’s staring back at him, big and mopey. “We’re okay—I’m sorry—I don’t want to fight,” Sammy says miserably when he pulls back a few seconds later.

“I know, but Sammy, you understand I can’t do this, right?”

“If you’re gonna tell me it’s because you think I’m too young—”

“Uh, for starters,” says Dean with an anxious laugh.

Sam huffs, “I’m not some confused kid. Just because I’m younger than you doesn’t mean I’m too young to know what I want.”

“That’s not what I said.” Sammy furrows his eyebrows. “I’m not gonna sit here and tell you I know what’s best for you. Not about this. But I need you to accept that _I’m_ not comfortable—foolin’ around with you, or whatever, at least not now. And even if it… feels good, or you think I want it and I’m just being stubborn—”

“But—”

“—It doesn’t matter, because I ain’t consenting. Anybody ever talk to you about consent, Sammy?”

“No, but I’ve read about it,” says Sam sullenly.

“Good. So you know you always gotta check for it, and even if at first she says yes—”

“ _She_?”

“Or he. Or me. Whoever. But if their answer changes to no, that’s nonnegotiable. It don’t matter if it was yes a week ago or ten minutes ago or what—you stop right there. That’s important.”

“I get it,” says Sam, sulky but earnest. Dean scrutinizes him for a long minute before he grunts out his satisfaction and wedges an arm around Sammy’s shoulders. Like that, the charged moment’s over, but he can feel Sam’s heart thumping fast and erratic against him to match his own for a long time after.

He eventually moves to the cot for the remainder of the night because he can’t _calm down_ enough to sleep with Sam’s hair and limbs all tangled up in his. He’s just starting to get his pulse under control when he hears the rustling of sheets from the queen as Sam rolls into the space Dean used to fill and rasps, “Dean?” But Dean doesn’t answer, closing his eyes and steadying his breathing until Sammy drifts off again.

Now that Dean _needs_ to cool things down with Sam, though, of course Sam is suddenly frickin’ everywhere. No: Sam’s already always there, but Dean’s been taking it for granted and didn’t really notice it until, at age eighteen, privacy from his brother has become important to him for the first time—and he can’t get any. Jesus, have they always _touched_ this much? He remembers the lack of contact feeling jarring in the weeks after Sammy’s—after Michigan, but Sam seems to think nothing of spending all his time right up in Dean’s space: tugging his elbow or patting his arm to get his attention, brushing shoulders in front of the bathroom mirror, flinging his arms around Dean’s middle the morning of his job interview with a squeaky, “Good luck, Dean!”

He doesn’t own much in the way of dress clothes—he still looks too young to pass for FBI when Dad brings him on hunts, so Dad hasn’t bothered getting him a suit yet, and the one Sonny helped him buy for his dance with Robin got left behind in New York—but he cobbles together a worn pair of slacks and a faded grey dress shirt from the few things Dad left behind in the dirty laundry bag. They can’t really afford to hit the coin laundry at this point, but about a minute after Dean started hunting for interview clothes the night before, Sammy started making a stink about having to wear smelly clothes to school until Dean finally agreed to do a load across the street. The kid’s real intentions were wildly transparent, but it was still kind of sweet of him to want Dean to take his best shot at the thing, and they should pay back the three bucks pretty quick if the effort helps Dean get the job.

He changes clothes in the bathroom of the drugstore next door to the diner ten minutes before his interview: his dress clothes are rumpled from sitting stuffed in his backpack all day, but Dean figures that’s better than letting them get soiled with sweat from the school day and the walk over. Compulsively smoothing out the wrinkles in his shirt, he saunters across the blacktop parking lot to the diner and crosses through two sets of double doors past the entryway.

There’s not much of a lobby to separate the wooden podium from the high-backed chairs and candlelit tables in the body of the diner. The floor tiles are made from some kind of stone, maybe granite, and laid out more or less in a square, and Dean’s just taking note of the doors in the back leading off to the bathrooms and emergency exit when a brunette waitress—early twenties, by Dean’s guess, and busty in a freakin’ suit and tie—approaches him. “Just one today? Smoking or non?” she asks in a high, falsely chipper voice.

“Actually, sweetheart, I’m here for an interview with, uh, Cameron. Is he around?”

The smile slides right out of the waitress’s eyes, her voice falling half an octave lower. “You mean Cam? Yeah, she’s here; I can bring you around back to meet her. Name and position?”

Dean can feel the tips of his ears heating up at his mistake, and he drops his own smirk, but quickly starts feeling a little naked without it. “The name’s Dean Winchester, and, uh… I’m a student?”

“Position you’re applying for, honey,” she says dryly as she beckons him to follow her. He checks her nametag—Cheyenne—before taking off after her.

“Oh—uh—I’m interested in whatever’s available? Busing or waiting or, hell, I make a mean Easy Mac if you’re looking for help in the kitchen—”

“We’re not,” Cheyenne tells him crisply, striding past the swinging door into the kitchen and ushering Dean past rows of stainless-steel appliances Dean’s never even heard of before toward a tall brown door off to the side. She raps twice and then cracks it open, poking her head inside. “Hey, Cam? Got a Dean, uh, Westchester here to see you? Says he’s got a nonspecific interview.”

“Yep, thanks. Send him in,” comes the muffled answer from inside, and Dean stumbles forward and pushes the door all the way open.

“Call me Cam,” the manager introduces herself with a fixed smile and a handshake. Her grip is firm and warm as he steps forward to take her hand, and he eases himself into the velveteen seat of the chair she indicates opposite hers at the glossy desk.

“Thanks, Cam. Dean Winchester.” His throat feels like sandpaper, his mouth cottony and dry.

Cameron resettles herself in her chair and scoots it forward toward Dean, folding her arms over the desk. “You have a resume, Dean Winchester?”

To his credit, Dean only balks for a few seconds. “Not—uh—not on me at the moment. Sorry. But I can bring them by later or-or mail them or something. I’ve worked all over—freelance stuff, retail—auto mechanic—I do it all. Whatever you need.”

Cameron’s forehead creases as she purses her lips. “You’re a student?”

“Yes, ma’am. Graduating in May, if all goes well.”

“Congratulations,” she tells him, softening for an instant. “It sounds like you have experience at quite a few locations.”

“That’s right.”

“And about how long would you say that you typically worked at each location? For example, what would have been your longest job?”

“Um, well, we move around a lot. I mean, we did—for my dad’s work. But I’m eighteen now—just turned eighteen—and I want to do what I gotta do to take care of my little brother. I’ll work hard. I’ve worked food service before.”

And it goes on like that for another ten minutes, Cameron smiling placidly at him and Dean stammering out his “yes, ma’ams” in a sweat. He volunteers Bobby’s and Pastor Jim’s names as references, but Cameron gives a tiny shake of her head and says that someone will be in touch with Dean for his references’ contact information along with a resume if they’re needed.

Cheyenne pops back in just as Cameron is showing Dean out. When he snakes past her with a sheepish grin, he hears her telling Cameron, “So I talked to my friend, and he says he can come in tomorrow afternoon like we talked about.”

“That sounds great. Once his other references check out, we should be able to get him working within the week,” comes Cameron’s answer, and Dean flushes hot as he dashes out onto the pavement.

Sammy, of course, is all over him from the moment Dean gets back to the room, jumping up from the desk and demanding how it went with a terribly earnest grin on his face. “Easy there, squirt,” he says with a fond, sad smile. “It went really good, just might be a little while before I hear anything one way or the other. Suburbanites and their red tape, am I right?”

-

He spends the next few evenings doing all he _can_ do, which appears to mean saving as much food for Sam as he can and finishing reading _Othello_. When he finishes it, it’s late Friday morning and he’s sitting at lunch with Mounia, who rolls her eyes when Dean hedges that he’s interested to see her interpretation of Desdemona. “In the o-original Shakespeare, she’s kind of a wimp, but in _Goodnight_ , it’s totally subverted. Instead of being p-passive, they re-imagine her as living vicariously through Othello’s war stories and marrying him as her best way to get out of the c-confines placed on her as a woman. I think most people like Act Three the b-best, when Romeo and Juliet are introduced—people are more familiar with _Romeo and Juliet_ —but Desdemona is wr-written so over-the-top bloodthirsty, she’s so much fun to play.”

“You said this is a parody of both of them?”

“Yeah, sort of. Constance—she’s the main character—she’s a Shakespearean professor whose r-research is all about how _she_ thinks the two plays were originally meant to be comedies, and would have ended happy, if Shakespeare had included a character who belonged to this archetype called the Fool, as she thinks he’d intended. Pretty early on, she gets s-sort of magically transported into the world of _Othello_ , and then after that of _Romeo and Juliet_ , and she actually lives through meeting the characters and watching things unfold comically, not tragically. There’s also a lot of tropes sh-showing up that Shakespeare commonly used, like iambic pentameter jokes and cross-dressing.”

“Cross-dressing?”

“ _So much_ cross-dressing,” Mounia confirms. “But that part is m-mostly in Act Three.”

The evening of the performance, Sam seems sullen, fidgeting with the bottom hemline of his sweatshirt and mumbling one-word answers whenever Dean attempts to engage him. Dean throws on a flannel over Dad’s shirt and pants he’d worn to his interview earlier: it clashes horribly, but it’s the best he’s got. “You’ll like this,” he promises Sam as the high school appears in the distance on their walk over, nudging Sammy’s shoulder in an encouraging sort of way.

Sam doesn’t nudge back. “So this is where you go to school all day,” he says kind of dubiously.

“You’ll like that, too—being in high school. You’ll get to take lots of geeky electives that sound interesting to you.”

“Are _your_ electives interesting to you?”

“Not… I mean, it’s kind of hard when we move around and different schools are in different places or don’t always offer the same classes. You’ll have a month acing work you already did at your last school, and then the next month, your new school is ahead of you and suddenly you’re two months behind, or worse, stuck in a class you weren’t even registered in before at all.” Sam’s lips are twitching, so Dean adds, “Some of them are okay. I guess Spanish might come in handy on hunts in border states, but my Spanish ain’t really good enough yet to make a difference. Physiology has some stuff to it that might be useful if one of us gets an injury I have to patch up, so that I know what I’m doing a little better.”

Keeping his head bowed, Sam steps back when they come up on the double doors, trailing behind Dean as they slouch inside. “Surgeries should be done in a _hospital_ ,” he finally mumbles.

“Don’t got any insurance, kiddo, and fraud is risky to pull off. Situation like ours, we shouldn’t do it unless we really need to.”

“Bleeding out on the carpet doesn’t count as needing it?” Sam asks, but Dean ignores him as they round the corner toward the school auditorium and come up on the ticket table.

Producing their tickets gets Dean and Sam ushered into the auditorium, where they squeeze past chortling parents and squirming little kids to find two seats halfway down the theatre in the leftmost section. Sam sits with his arms crossed, playing with the frayed edges of his sleeves, and Dean elbows him. “Relax. What’s got you so wound up for?”

Sammy tucks his chin to his chest and won’t look at Dean, although he does elbow him back halfheartedly after a pause. “You look really nice,” he finally says.

Frowning, Dean looks down at himself, the too-short flannel slung over Dad’s faded dress clothes. “What? Not really. Listen, if you’re scared about what these other jackasses are thinking about you—”

“I’m not scared,” Sammy huffs, and he looks so pouty and young in that moment that Dean elbows him again and flashes him a wide grin. Sam seems to deflate, his face crumpling just a little, and he wriggles awkwardly over the armrest between them to lean against Dean’s upper arm, pressing his forehead into Dean’s neck.

Freezing, Dean doesn’t know whether it would do more or less damage to shove Sam away, but then the lights start to dim and he loses the chance to play it off as a joke. He leans over the kid’s head and says hoarsely, directly into his ear, “Just enjoy the play, Sammy.”

Sam honest-to-god shivers as he tucks in closer, and Dean narrowly reins in a shudder of his own. At first, he’s almost angry with Sam, but Sammy doesn’t do anything more than rest against Dean’s side and squirm over the armrest that’s no doubt jabbing into his waist, and it wouldn’t be fair to blame him for Dean’s flush and stuttering pulse, not when Sam seems to be respecting what Dean told him about boundaries. He isn’t doing anything they wouldn’t have done before the last few months, which means Dean can only be reacting differently because _Dean_ has changed in some way, or because he somehow never noticed that he and Sam have always been—sick— _too_ close, and—

He heaves a deep breath and tries to pay better attention when Mounia comes onstage, dressed in full period gowns as Desdemona. It’s not a musical, and he’s pleased to find that Mounia is actually even better at acting than at singing, her stutter almost gone ( _how_ did she do that?) and her usual slight stiffness melting into a sort of commanding haughtiness for the role. Of course, it’s Dean’s luck that the combination of watching his ex-girlfriend’s dominant performance with feeling the hard heat of Sam’s small form nestled up to his is—distracting, in places where he _cannot afford_ to feel distracted.

Has that ever happened before? Going back over his whole damn life beside Sammy, yeah, there were times—plenty of them—over the last few years when Dean got an awkward boner pressed up close to Sam on the couch or sitting on a bed together or something, but inexplicable erections have been happening to Dean all the time since he was around middle-school age, and he never used to think anything of it. Now, though, he knows what Sammy _tastes_ like, and he can’t stop thinking about getting his mouth back on Sam’s, about…

The first two acts crawl along before the play breaks for intermission, and Dean still couldn’t really tell you much about whatever he just watched. Sammy, at least, seems pretty into it, chattering about Shakespearean conventions with a merciful few inches back between their bodies, though Dean can still see the remnants of Sam’s earlier discomfort in his face and speech, both slightly less animated than Dean would have expected. He excuses himself to the restroom and doesn’t come back until two minutes before showtime, soft again and hating himself.

Mounia was right: the _Romeo and Juliet_ part _is_ funnier. Ro and Jules are shown to be bored as hell with each other just days after their wedding, Juliet basically fantasizing about suicide as a way to be edgy or get attention or some shit, and then they _both_ become totally infatuated with Constance, the professor chick Mounia said was the main character. There’s lots of confusion about all the characters’ genders and identities based solely on whether each one happens to be wearing a skirt at any particular moment, Constance the only character who seems able to keep track of who’s actually male or female, as Julie and Ro both try to seduce her by cross-dressing and performing comic spins on Shakespearean soliloquies. There’s some lesbianism that Dean finds mildly discomfiting (though hot), the random-ass ghost of Hamlet’s dad pops in, and then Mounia shows back up and nearly murders multiple characters on impulse before they all figure out that Constance is both the wise fool character she’d been looking for _and_ the true author of all of Shakespeare’s plays.

He’s a little worried how Sammy will react to the suicide themes, but Sam seems fine, laughing healthily at most of those lines. “That was beautiful,” he says when it’s over, turning to Dean while the cast is taking a final bow together onstage. “The way only Constance picked up on the obvious audience asides and costume changes for what they were—that was a great twist on how modern readers usually have trouble with suspension of disbelief for storytelling devices that writers like Shakespeare relied on to create dramatic irony.”

“Of course _that_ would be your biggest takeaway, geek-boy,” says Dean with a smirk. “Come on, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

Mouth set into a frown, Sam lurks behind him as Dean leads the way up to the stage, where the cast and crew members seem to be mingling with friends and family now that the applause has wrapped up. He takes the steps up to the stage two at a time and then pivots a couple times, searching. “Hey, Mounia!” he finally calls when he sights her, and when he catches her eye, he adds, “Desdemona!”

She rolls her eyes as they make their way toward each other, Dean clapping a hand on Sammy’s shoulder. “You were awesome up there, Mounia. You did so great.”

“Three shows d-down, one to go,” she shrugs, reaching forward to give him an awkward, one-armed hug, a bouquet of something colorful resting on one of her elbows. “Thanks for coming out.”

“What, and miss your big performance? Hey—want you to meet somebody,” he says, tugging Sam forward a little. “This is my little brother, Sammy.”

“Hi, Sammy. It’s really good to finally meet you. I’ve heard a lot a-about you from your brother,” says Mounia with a small smile.

“Oh,” Sam mumbles, and Mounia’s face falls the littlest bit.

Dean tries to elbow him in the back as covertly as possible. “He’s been listening to that mixtape you gave me practically nonstop for the last week, ain’t that right, Sammy?”

“So you like r-rock music, too?” asks Mounia.

“No,” Sam tells her, but in the awkward pause that follows, he eventually adds, “The alternative stuff on it is better, I guess.”

“Yeah, I—” Mounia starts to say, and then she’s rescued by her parents, who both greet Dean with a couple of curt nods.

Sammy stays stiff and distant the whole walk out of there, dodging Dean’s attempts at both teasing and conversation. It’s a little chilly outside, and the kid hunches over in his hoodie and looks like he’s trying to make himself about two sizes smaller than he already is. “Okay, all right, what’s up with you tonight?” Dean finally prods when they turn into the parking lot of the motel.

“Nothing’s _up_ with me.”

“Bull _shit_. You’ve been actin’ off all night. Spit it out, come on.”

“Maybe I’m pissed you spent our food money on tickets we can’t afford just to look good in front of your girlfriend,” Sam finally says in a big rush.

Dean just stares for a second. “Don’t say ‘pissed.’”

“Don’t treat me like a child!”

“You _are_ a child. I don’t want you to have to grow up like…” He gestures disgustedly, then shoves off Sam’s arm when the kid tries to reach for him. “And I told you, Mounia’s not my girlfriend anymore. If I wanted to score points, I wouldn’t have brought a _tagalong_ —” Sammy flinches “—but I thought you would like it, and I thought you could use some—that _we_ could use the time out of the room.”

“You didn’t have to parade me around in front of her like that.”

“ _Parade_ —Sammy, I wanted her to meet you because you’re _important_ to me. It’s like—it’s like nobody really knows who I am unless they know you, too.”

“Oh,” Sam says miserably, and they stop outside their door while Dean fishes in his pockets for the key. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he whispers with big eyes, and Dean pulls him into the room with an arm slung around him.

“You’re fine. You’re gonna be fine! You just need to get through this—this funk you’re in. Everything’s going to get easier soon as Dad comes back, I promise.”

Sammy clings to Dean by the waist, shaking. “Promise you’ll eat something for dinner tonight.”

“Sammy… kiddo…”

“I know we’re going to run out, but you can still take some of mine.”

“I’m not eating your food, buddy.”

“Take it!”

That’s how Dean leaves him: panting and shouting just inside the room even as Dean shoves his hands in his pockets and takes off again. He hadn’t been planning on following Mounia’s advice, and he doesn’t really know what possesses him to do so now, but he pulls out his phone once he’s put a few blocks between himself and the motel and punches in Sonny’s cell number. The stupid thing rings a full four times, and Dean’s just started pulling his phone away from his ear to hang it up when he hears a click followed by Sonny’s gruff voice. “Been a few months since I’ve gotten a phone call from _this_ number.”

“I know, sir. I’m sorry.”

“Hey, none of that ‘sir’ stuff. All my boys are family even after they move on beyond the farm.” Dean can hear the smile in Sonny’s voice even through the crackle of background static. “You calling with good news or bad, D-Dawg?”

“Well, it’s not good,” Dean admits, and then he launches into the whole thing, leaving out some of the finer points about what exactly Dad’s job out of town involves and the extent to which he’s fallen out of contact. He divulges just how low their funds are, though, how they only really have as much left as they do because Dean skips most meals, and how helpless he feels trying to keep Sammy healthy, let alone happy.

Sonny listens quietly at first until Dean runs out of words, all at once. “You may not have ever given me a straight answer about what your father does for a living, son,” he finally tells Dean, “but _nothing_ he could possibly do—not even fighting monsters like you always mouth off about—would be a good enough reason not to ensure that you have basic shelter and food. Now, you _know_ I believe the most powerful thing I can give one of you boys is the agency to make your own choices, but you also know I have to tell you that you and your brother are always welcome at the farmhouse if you boys want it.”

“We don’t,” says Dean, no hesitation. “We’re not leaving him.”

Sonny sighs. “I worry that _he’s_ the one who leaves _you_ , even more than when you tell me. Even if now you’re eighteen, sometimes I think when your dad came to get you from the house, I should have…” Dean swallows hard as Sonny regroups or something and then adds, “But either way, you have to know you need to _eat_. We’ve been through this, Dean. I understand people make tough choices when poverty limits their options, but you do have more than just the two—starving or stealing. And I’m proud of you for not stealing this time, but—”

“I can’t help it,” Dean confesses softly. “Or maybe I can, but—I don’t know how to stop. I feel so sick _all_ the time, and I…”

“We went over this when you came to the house, Dean. The nausea’s gonna get better soon as you get used to having food in your belly again—start with small portions and work your way up. And don’t give me that nonsense about how every bite is a bite that could’ve gone to Sammy. You _both_ deserve enough. There ain’t no person any more or less worthy of survival and comfort than any other.”

“I know. I know that.” He swallows hard. “Be easier to remember that if there really _were_ enough food to go around, but there’s just not right now, Sonny.”

There’s a pause, then a sigh, from Sonny’s end of the line. “And you’ve tried to find work already, I bet?”

“There’s nothing. Stupid suburbs and their fucking…”

“Okay. What’s the number one thing I try and teach all you boys?”

Dully, Dean recites, “Personal accountability.”

“That’s right,” he answers, pleased. “Sometimes the options aren’t good ones, and that’s not fair—that’s where systemic reform comes in, all right? But before you can make the big changes happen, you’ve got to get your own needs met so that you have enough left over to devote to making things happen. So. You and your brother need food to eat and a place to stay without income. What do you do?”

“I don’t _know_. Everything makes you pay money to—”

“Not everything,” Sonny says gently. “Your old man doesn’t seem like the type to want to accept charity, but the programs are in place for a reason.”

“We can’t take that.”

“You can if the alternative is homelessness, and if you don’t like it, let that be a lesson to you to plan ahead in the future, whether that means moving where the job is or moving on from your pop if he’s not gonna provide for you. You’re an adult now, D-Dawg, and you have more choices. Come on. What do you know about local shelters or food pantries? How about free lunch programs through your school?”

“I don’t know anything,” Dean says, but he hastens to add, “but I can find out. Tomorrow. They have computers that anyone can use in the library at school.”

“Good. Now, these places don’t have unlimited resources: sometimes they run out of beds or meals, or the paperwork for the free lunch doesn’t go through as soon as you need it. What then?”

I, uh… um. We have enough for a few more days, but we can stop spending now and treat that as a reserve to stretch it longer. I wanted to protect Sammy, but…”

“No, that’s real good, son. What if it still runs out a couple weeks down the line? What then?”

“Well… Mounia might be able to let us crash once or twice, but it wouldn’t be right to rely on her, and she’s got parents she lives with.”

“But that’s good you’re thinking about those options. Is there anyone you _can_ count on?”

“Probably—um—I mean, we’ve stayed with Bobby before, but he doesn’t live anywhere near here. Same for Pastor Jim.”

They carry on like that for a while, formulating a plan—Dean formulating it, really, although without Sonny talking him down, he doubts he could have done it at all. It’s good to hear from Sonny, even though Dean’s starting to feel guilty for waiting so long to call. He gets so sucked into the hunt they’re doing with Dad or whatever Sam has going on that Dean always loses track of everyone else he _could_ have in his life, if he tried harder to keep them.

After he and Sonny say goodbye, he walks aimlessly for a while before heading back to the motel, the sting of air on his face and his exposed ankles helping a little to clear his head. He’ll have Dad pick him up a longer pair of jeans when he comes back and makes everything better. Dean’s actually starting to feel pretty okay about how things are going to turn out, until he lets himself back into the room, whistling under his breath, and finds Sammy missing.

Sammy— _what if_ —but Dean would feel bad for jumping to conclusions when Sonny _just_ got done telling him how everybody’s responsible for making their own choices. Maybe Sam just went to the store or out for a walk: he’d seemed pretty wigged out, after all. But Dean checks: Sam didn’t leave a note to tell him where he’d gone, and when another half an hour passes with no Sammy to show for it, Dean starts to seriously worry. The salt lines are all still intact, so he can’t have been taken by a monster breaking in, but what if Sammy got jumped blowing off steam outside? He didn’t seem angry enough with Dean to do something moronic like try to run away, but what if he picked up on the—the thoughts Dean’s been having about him and took off, or worse, it triggered his-his depression, or whatever the hell is wrong with Sam, and he went to go… find more pills, or a bridge or a parking structure or something to—

By the time the doorknob rattles and Sammy sidles inside with his face turned away, Dean’s worked himself into a frenzy, and he pretty much lunges for Sam and starts to rattle him by the shoulders, gripping tight. “What the _fuck_ is your problem, huh? Why didn’t you leave a note? You _asshole_ , I thought you— _I thought_ —”

He doesn’t get a chance to get a look at Sam’s expression: he doesn’t have time to try before Sammy tilts his head back up and slams their mouths together. Too shocked to react at first, Dean stands there like a dumbass while Sam bites all over his lips and shoves Dean’s flannel back off his shoulders to the ground. When Sam tries to half-walk, half-push Dean backward onto the bed, he finally snaps out of his stupor and wrenches his mouth away, shouting, “Sammy! What I _tell_ you about consent and boundaries? Not okay, dude.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam whispers, wild. “I’m sorry. _Please_ , just please, I need it, Dean, I…” And then his whole face wrenches tight and he starts to cry.

He actually tries to start kissing Dean again, but by this point, Dean can tell that something’s _really_ wrong, and he holds Sam at arm’s length, gentler than before. “Hey, Sammy, no. I need you to stop, okay? Hey, we don’t need none of that—I’m not mad.” Really, he _is_ still at least a little mad, but he’s deflating rapidly and realizes that, whatever’s going on with Sammy right now, hollering at him’s not going to get through to him. “I know you and me… that it’s been intense lately, and that’s my fault, but whatever it is that’s happening with you right now, I get the feeling it ain’t gonna help you to get laid.”

“But I need to forget,” Sam mutters, going down easy when Dean settles them both on the bed. “Won’t you help me forget?”

“Forget what, Sammy?”

Sam swallows thickly and then slowly reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a few crumpled twenties. Dean’s stomach sinks right down to the floor. “Sammy, where the _hell_ did you get this?” he asks, but he already knows. Of course he knows.

“I… I had to do something. I know you don’t want me to know, but I know it’s been really bad, and I couldn’t just wait for Dad to come save us. I went to the… the corner where…”

Dean hushes him when Sammy starts to cry again, and he lets Sam huddle up to him, crawling into Dean’s lap. “It’s over, Sammy. It’s over now. I’m gonna take care of you.”

“Oh, yeah? How’s that?” Sam’s trying to sound angry, but it just comes out kind of pitifully.

He rubs Sam’s back over all the layers he’s wearing, shushing soothingly. “Well, I left earlier to go figure that out. I was gonna look into shelters and stuff—hey, no, no, Sammy,” he adds quickly when Sam cries harder. “But now I think we’re going to skip a few steps forward to plan Z, which is staying with Pastor Jim at the church. Huh? Would you like that, kiddo?”

Sam sucks in a shuddering breath and rubs his runny face on Dean’s sleeve. “He tells Dad everything he finds out from us. I don’t want…”

“Okay. Yeah. Fair point,” says Dean, and Sam sniffles and chuckles rather pathetically. “How about Uncle Bobby, then, hmm, Sammy? How’s South Dakota sound to you? You ready to blow this joint?”

“We haven’t got a car.”

“No, but we _have_ got enough money to buy bus tickets. I had S—uh—I went to the library to look up the phone number for the nearest Greyhound station. Bobby’s always been loyal to you and me, right?”

“Right,” says Sam uncertainly. Dean doesn’t push it, letting the kid curl up with his head in Dean’s lap as he gets out his phone and dials the number he wrote on his hand outside.

He calls Bobby and Dad both after he’s reserved two tickets to Sioux Falls to pick up with payment at the station. The call to Dad is simple—it goes straight to voicemail, and Dean tells him to meet them at Bobby’s when he wraps up—but Bobby is tougher, if only because Dean can just picture the stupid, pitying look on his face as he promises to call in the morning to get them both enrolled in school out there. There’s a little time left over before they’ll need to leave for the bus, so he lets Sam sleep where he’s dozed off in Dean’s lap and absently strokes through Sammy’s hair.

“Gonna make this up to you. You just wait and see,” Dean mumbles, and Sam shifts a little in his sleep.


End file.
